Chapter One

Holy Gods, don’t know what I did to piss you off, but dropping a starship on my head is overkill.

Vibration sliced Edie’s sternum. She registered the data flashing down the ballistic-glass lenses of her Sensory Enhancement Module.

Adrenaline stole her breath.

She flung a glance skyward. No mean feat standing at the dusty bottom of the two-kilometer-deep slash in the planetary crust. The optics on her enviro-helmet flared, then darkened to shield her eyes as she scanned the narrow, heat-bleached strip of sky. Dust from the charred rock walls sifted past her visor.

She studied the angle of descent and engine frequency readings.

“Aw, c’mon,” she muttered as trajectory projections flashed red, driving sharp-edged alarm through her breastbone.

Incoming mass. Right on target to squash her.

Bad.

It was smoking a hole through the already broiling atmosphere. From the data on her SEM, and from the ache lodged in her chest in response to the advancing pressure wave, it looked like the radioactive star drive was intact and still powered up.

Worse.

Blood pounding in her head, Edie ran in the killing heat of a planet about to be consumed by its dying, expanding star.

The sky, her SEM, and the canyon lit like a supernova. The flash overwhelmed her optics. Blinded, she clenched her eyes shut, too damned late.

Reactor core explosion.

Brilliant. Now the atmosphere was radioactive as well as roasting.

Shockwave rattled the canyon and ripped the breath from her lungs. It shoved her straight into the unforgiving stone wall.

Her helmet struck rock, slamming her head against the inside. She tumbled to the ground. Why the bleeding Gods hadn’t she padded the helmet?

Sonic vibration rattled the canyon again.

No time to be on your back, Edie. Radioactive wreckage incoming.

She scrambled for the only shelter she could reach and dove face first into a hole in the canyon wall.

The ship hit.

Ground heaved, rumbling and rolling beneath her. Debris pelted her.

A piece at a time, the crash-quake stilled.

Itching to rub away the sweat running between her breasts, she struggled to get her breath in the overheated, stale air inside her environmental suit, which was doing a piss poor job of controlling the environment.

Opening her eyes, she risked lifting her head. She’d taken shelter in one of the caves honeycombing the cliffs.

By reflex, she checked sensor readings only to stare into an empty projection field. SEM offline. She sat up.

Dust, gravel, and fist-sized stones tumbled from her enviro-suit. At some point in the proceedings, the face plate in her helmet had cracked. Another bit of gear she couldn’t afford to be without, yet couldn’t afford to repair.

At least the helmet wasn’t strictly necessary on world. Still. Until she fixed it, she risked losing suit integrity in a critical situation elsewhere.

Unless she put aside a thus-far-fruitless bounty hunt in favor of salvaging the wrecked ship. Never look a superheated, radioactive gift Orhait in the mouth, right? Even one solid piece of salvage would pay for suit repair. Maybe even Seeker bombs.

First things first. She reset her SEM. The ballistic glass lenses winked to life. A faint twinge of discomfort at her temples assured her the sensory stimulator had come online, too.

Her handheld vibrated. A couple of well-practiced inputs on the unit and data fed into the SEM’s visual field.

Stellar. Back in business.

Her SEM picked up the pops and pings of cooling metal, translating audio signals Edie couldn’t hear into visuals she could read. Good. The crash had touched down nearby. Impact fires were burning out.

She’d have to move fast. The United Mining and Ore Processing Guild had a base within the warren of tunnels on world, and she wouldn’t be the only one with an eye for profit. Edie crawled out of the tunnel and climbed to her feet.

The smoldering hulk of twisted, fragmented alloy, still glowing from re-entry, rested a kilometer up the canyon. It towered halfway up the rock wall. The UMOPG had shot it to all Three Hells. She couldn’t even place the vessel class.

As she trudged closer, her suit’s bio-system judged her in need of hydration therapy. A quick pinch over her femoral artery spread cool through her. Her pulse slowed. Breathing became easier.

Fortified, she picked up her pace. By the time she’d made her way down the impact scar, blistering re-entry heat had dissipated to something nonfatal. Edie kept a close eye on radiation levels, though, because there were all kinds of hot.

Readings didn’t fluctuate. Amazing. She’d have sworn no one could survive the kind of damage she was looking at, much less the plunge into atmosphere. But the more she stared at steady radiation numbers, the more she believed someone had lived inside that disaster long enough to eject the reactor core before it had blown.

As she closed in on the ship, she noted structural supports shredded like wet ceremonial paper. She hadn’t yet seen any weapons’ emplacements. Those would tell her which government had built the ship, not to mention that salvaged weapon tech commanded the best credits, even shot up.

She rounded the wreckage.

A shattered, and, in places, molten view screen dripped in great oily globs to the dust. This section had been part of the command deck structure of a much larger vessel.

Her SEM flashed a familiar rhythm. Heartbeats. Several of them.

Twelve Gods. Survivors.